Archives For Flex

Finding Book Bonus Content

December 20, 2011

For many of my books, bonus content is made available through the publisher. Sometimes this is material that was intended for the book but had to be cut, such as an appendix or a chapter, and sometimes the material is a true bonus, such as a video screencast. Because it’s not clear for everyone how to access this bonus material, I thought I’d quickly post instructions here.

  1. Head to Peachpit.com (almost all of my books are published by Peachpit Press)
  2. Click on Account Sign In at the top of the page.
  3. If you don’t already have an account with Peachpit.com, click the Create a new one… link to register.
  4. After you have registered, login.
  5. On your account page (after logging in), click Registered Products.
  6. On the Registered Products tab, click Register Another Product.
  7. Follow the instructions to register the book.
  8. Return to the Registered Products page.
  9. For the book in question, click the Access Bonus Content link. That will take you to a page with all the bonus content for a given book.

Besides being able to access bonus content, there are other benefits to registering at Peachpit’s site. And while you’re there, you can also check out my author page, which lists the books I’ve written for Peachpit, the articles I’ve published there, and the blog postings I’ve published there. Both the articles and blog postings are viewable without registration or logging in.

I hope that helps anyone having trouble finding the material they’re looking for.

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Last week, or thereabouts, Adobe announced that it was discontinuing support for Flash on mobile devices. This is, by all accounts, a wave of the white flag in Adobe’s battle against Apple and its iOS devices (if only Steve Jobs were alive today to celebrate). I didn’t think too much of that decision: it does make sense to use HTML5 or native apps for dynamic content to be run on mobile devices anyway. And Flash would still continue to run on desktops, where something like 99% of browsers have the plug-in and 90-some% of video is run through Flash. Flash is such a large component of Adobe’s various technologies that I can’t imagine Adobe leaving it behind.

And then Adobe announced today that it was offering Flex to the Apache Software Foundation (managers of the ubiquitous Apache Web server, among other projects).  Apache will need to vote on whether to accept Flex or not. This announcement does surprise me, as Flex is used not only for Flash creation, but also desktop and mobile application development via the AIR platform. Adobe says it will continue to support Flash and Flex, but clearly Adobe is moving more towards HTML5.

An interesting, and rather big, development. One does not normally think of a technology with such a large market share being outright dropped. We shall see how this plays out…

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In this edition…

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